John Mitchell is co-founder and chief executive of Episode Six, an Austin, Texas company whose TRITIUM platform runs card programs and ledgers for banks and brands in more than 50 countries. He started it in Hong Kong in 2015 with two long-time colleagues.
Prepaid Cards at NetSpend
Mitchell has worked in payments since 1999, when he joined NetSpend, the Austin company that became one of the largest processors of retail prepaid cards in the United States. He stayed until 2007.
After NetSpend he and his colleagues built processing for multi-wallet and multi-currency prepaid products, work he described on Fintech One-on-One. That stretch ran until 2015.
Starting Again in Hong Kong
In 2015 Mitchell, Chermaine Hu, and Futeh Kao started Episode Six, the sixth payments venture they had worked on together. They chose Hong Kong partly because they could set up a company in a day. Mitchell is chief executive, Hu chief financial officer, and Kao chief technology officer.
The product they built, TRITIUM, combines card processing with a parallel ledger that can hold many currencies, and it can run in a client’s chosen cloud region. Japan Airlines became a client in 2017 and runs JAL Pay on the platform, and in 2025 the airline became an investor. Earlier backers include HSBC, Mastercard, SBI Investment, and Anthos Capital, which put in a $30 million Series B in 2021, nine months after a $7 million Series A, bringing total capital raised to $40 million. Its peers include i2c and Paymentology.
Asia First
The company now has its headquarters in Austin, with employees in 20 countries, but Mitchell says Asia remains its strongest region. For a founder who began on prepaid cards in Austin, the company has come full circle.
